LITMIR.BIZ

      FOREWORD

      BACK IN THE summer of 1980, I was commissioned by Magill magazine in Dublin to write a lengthy article about the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin. Magill’s editor was particularly interested in the internal politics of the Provos and whether rumours of a northern takeover and resulting divisions and tensions held any truth at all.

      For me it was the start of a long career spent reporting on the Provisional movement, its leaders, and its politics, an experience that most of the time was fascinating, often frustrating, and occasionally disturbing. Throughout all those years I was painfully aware that the IRA and Sinn Féin were organisations defined by their secrecy and that as an outsider I would be lucky ever to learn more than a fraction of the truth of any story.

      The IRA had a rule enforcing internal silence similar to the Sicilian Mafia’s omerta and added to that was a long legacy of distrust of the media in all its forms and whatever the national origin. But there was another unwritten rule that governed the business of reporting the IRA, and that was the knowledge that though it might take years, the IRA could never keep a lid on all its activities and eventually stories its leadership would rather have kept suppressed would seep to the surface. Human nature eventually prevailed over autocracy, and the patient observer could enjoy a rich harvest.

      My Magill commission became a metaphor, in its way, for all this. The IRA leadership agreed to cooperate with me, and the organisation’s director of publicity, Danny Morrison, introduced me to various figures that I had asked to talk to. We spent many hours together that summer, often on the road, discussing the Provisional movement. The article was written, and looking back at the episode it is difficult not to conclude, unhappily, that much of it reflected the direction I was steered towards.

      I was able quite easily to confirm that the Provisionals were indeed riven at that time with division and tension and two camps now existed, one represented by Gerry Adams and his young, militantly left-wing northern supporters and the other led by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáthí Ó Conaill, the older, southern-based veterans who had been at the forefront of the first leadership of the Provisionals.

      Bob White has, in this book, done an excellent and exhaustive job of examining the causes, course, and outcome of that division, and I need not dwell upon all that here. Suffice it to say that my article oversimplified the dispute to the advantage of the northerners, portraying it as being about left versus right, young and angry versus old and jaded, revolutionaries versus conservatives, the clever and imaginative versus the dull and gullible. I would not write the same article today but there is no doubt that at the time, Gerry Adams’s camp was pleased to see it in print.

      It would be twenty years before I would learn, courtesy of 6 Bradaigh, what happened after the article was published. The northerners may well have been happy with it, but they knew the Ó Brádaigh wing would be furious and suspicious that the northerners had connived to shape it. And so at the first meeting of the Ard Chomhairle, the committee that runs Sinn Fein, held after the article appeared, Danny Morrison proposed a motion expressing outrage at what I had written and instructing Ard Chomhairle members not to have any contact with me in the future.

      From that point on, and for some years afterwards, none of the Ó Brádaigh-Ó Conaill camp would have any dealings with me, even going so far as to turn on their heels if they saw me approaching

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